I described in an earlier post on AWR views how the dictionary views were using metadata and object links to show information from other containers. But this mechanism cannot work for fixed views (aka V$) because they don’t have their definition in the dictionary.
The big difference is that most of V$ views are available long before the dictionary is opened or even created. Just start an instance in NOMOUNT and you can query the V$ views. Even in multitenant, you can switch to different containers in MOUNT, and query V$ views, when no dictionary is opened.

On 31st of May in Düsseldorf, at DOAG Datenbank, I’ll talk about transportable tablespaces and pluggable databases. Both methods are transporting data physically, the difference is in the transport of the metadata, which can be more flexible when transported logically, as with TTS, but faster when transported physically with PDB. I have a lot of demos to show transportable tablespaces with RMAN, and the different cloning features available in 12cR2. If I have time I’ll show what is inside the dumpfile when using Data Pump to export the metadata. Here is the idea.

expdp transport_tablespaces

Here is how we export metadata with Data Pump for transportable tablespaces.

Actually, this is a follow up post from my performance deep dive into tablespace encryption. After having investigated how tablespace encryption works, this blogpost is looking at the other encryption option, column encryption. A conclusion that can be shared upfront is that despite they basically perform the same function, the implementation and performance consequences are quite different.